Stacked light circle effect in Photoshop?

Question 1

What would be the best way to achieve the effect in the image?

I’ve tried making my own brush and working around that but it doesn’t seem ideal.

I’m wondering how to replicate the random looking short strokes around a perfect circle path.

Is there a better way rather than painstakingly drawing each stroke?

Thanks

Question 2

I think there’re different ways to achieve a similar this effect. Here’re several ideas:

Use a smart object with Polar Coordinates filter applied. This way you can paint straight lines inside the SO and they’ll be transformed to circlular ones — that’s quite easy to control, you can put any shapes in the original SO layer, adjust strokes length and position. Adding slightly rotated lines will make the circular lines not perfectly circular.

Use a 3rd party cursor snapping tool like Lazy Nezumi for Windows or Hej Stylus! for Mac: they allow to snap cursor to a specific path: line, circle, perspective, etc. I didn’t use Hej Stylus! but with Lazy Nezumi it’s possible to ease the effect so that the lines aren’t always perfectly circular.

p.s. and obviously listening to Lauren Mayberry’s voice also should help 😀

Answer